Sprite

From Sega Retro

A sprite is a 2-dimensional movable image that appears on the screen.

In Mega Drive games, sprites can be no larger than 32x32 pixels and use no more than 15 colors (plus 1 for transparency), so several sprites are often used by a single object (for example the Sonic object). The way sprites are arranged together in a single object is called sprite mappings. It is also possible to zoom sprites up to full screen.[1]

A sprite is essentially a texture, or textured rectangle.[2] Sprites can be used for both two-dimensional gameplay (as flat surfaces) and three-dimensional gameplay (with scaling, rotation and distortion). Sprites could be manipulated to resemble texture-mapped 3D polygons, as is the case with several Sega systems, including the Sega Saturn console and the Sega X Board, Y Board, System 32, ST-V and H1 Boardarcade systems. A sprite can also be used as a texture that is applied to the surface of a 3D polygon, resulting in a texture-mapped 3D polygon. Conversely, a texture-mapped polygon could be manipulated to resemble a 2D sprite (rendering a textured quad polygon as a flat surface), as is the case with the Sega Dreamcast console and Sega NAOMIarcade system.